Send this to a friend

Ellen Johnson and the staff of the Children’s Home of Cincinnati provide help and direction for local children in need.

Lucy May

Senior Staff Reporter

Ellen Johnson had been working at the Children’s Home of Cincinnati for about eight years when she realized she wanted to run the place.

It was 1998, and Wes Young, then executive director, had tapped Johnson to help create a new vision for the agency after the decision was made to close its residential treatment center. He asked her to work on program development, which involved helping to create a new array of programs and services to help the troubled and mentally ill children that the agency served.

“We literally wiped out almost everything the organization did and had a completely blank slate,” Johnson said. “My job was to build new programs.”

She created a business plan to broaden the Children’s Home’s work in early childhood development and essentially reinvent the organization.

“For me, I felt like I’d found something in this work that I’m really good at,” she said. She abandoned her goal of becoming a child psychologist and decided to get an MBA instead.

Young saw Johnson’s potential, too, and before long asked Greater Cincinnati Foundation President and CEO Kathryn Merchant if she would mentor his promising associate executive director, Merchant recalls.

Merchant began meeting with Johnson every other month or so and came to appreciate her strategic mind and organizational skills.

Still, when the Children’s Home board approached Johnson about succeeding Young and becoming the organization’s chief executive, she had other ideas. She was being recruited for executive roles at other organizations. She wanted the job at the Children’s Home. But during the 18 months until Young retired, Johnson proposed spending several months working at another nonprofit to broaden her experience and expand her network.

The board and Young agreed, and Johnson spent four months working for Merchant at the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, helping to craft a new strategy to make the foundation more helpful to donors as they tried to make a difference in the community.

“She essentially did an analysis for us on the best thinking in the universe for how knowledge organizations work and helped us lay out our strategy for change,” Merchant said. “Those were exactly the skills she needed to put to work in her new job at the Children’s Home.”

As a central resource for nonprofits, the Greater Cincinnati Foundation also had connections to donors and organizations that Johnson had never met.

“When you’re responsible for a whole organization, you’re also responsible for its connection to the broader community,” she said.

More connections

So when Johnson became president and CEO of the Children’s Home in 2005, she took the job armed with new connections and relationships made at the foundation.

And she has been especially good at collaborating with other social service agencies and helping the Children’s Home partner with other nonprofits when it makes sense, said Jim Schwab, U.S. Bank Cincinnati market president and a vice chairman of the Children’s Home’s board.

“In my opinion, she is one of the most sophisticated of our human services executives,” Schwab said. “She’s trained a little bit differently. She has a lot of experience as a human resource professional, but she also has an MBA.”

While she’s the first woman CEO of the Children’s Home, she also is the first chief executive to have come through its ranks.

And the distinction of being a homegrown CEO has made a bigger difference for Johnson than being a woman, she said.

Although she had been at the Children’s Home for 15 years before becoming CEO, Johnson still had to build political capital with the board when she took the top job and had to transition from being a colleague to being the boss, all the while balancing new demands from funders to demonstrate measurable results and calls from corporate leaders who want to see local nonprofits run more like businesses.

For her part, Johnson doesn’t completely buy the idea that nonprofits can be run just like businesses and get better results.

“For me, in my role, I think it’s like the difference between being king and senator. It’s very legislative versus executive,” she said, adding that the CEO of a nonprofit must meet the needs of clients, board members and the community rather than leading the way a for-profit business can.

“I have to remind myself I’m here for the kids, I’m here for the kids,” she said.

But that’s not hard to do. After all, the Children’s Home serves 3-year-olds with mental health problems because they were never held and looked at eye-to-eye or spoken to face-to-face by their parents. One 8-year-old boy needed help after seeing his mother murder her boyfriend, who had been abusing the children and their pets. But after the mother killed him, she didn’t move the body from their home right away. And the 8-year-old’s job was to keep visitors away from the dead body, Johnson said.

“There are so many cute, little faces with such big problems,” Johnson said.

Numbers support direction

That helps keep her going. After all, the Children’s Home served more than 6,900 children during its fiscal year ended in June, on its campus, at schools or in other programs. That’s many times the 500 kids a year the agency served when it closed down its residential program in 1998, Johnson said. The budget has tripled to $15 million annually in that time, too.

And those numbers underscore that the changes the agency made were the right ones to reach more children, she said.

“Ellen has a clarity of vision for what they want to do and be in the community,” said Beech Acres Parenting Center CEO Jim Mason, who works closely with Johnson. “They have articulated their strategic areas, and they have pursued them very effectively.”

For Johnson, the challenge is finding new resources and new ways to deliver the services that the region’s children need.

“There aren’t fewer kids living in poverty, and where there’s poverty there are all kinds of challenges,” she said. “Our goal is striving to create impact in the community in whatever way it takes.”

My, How They Have Grown

Ellen Johnson, CEO of the Children’s Home of Cincinnati, helped steer the nonprofit in a new direction that lets it serve more local children in need.

The group served more than 6,900 children during the fiscal year that ended in June.

By contrast, before the agency closed its residential program in 1998, it was serving 500 children each year.

Industries:

Comments

If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.